Career
High Effort, Low Output? The Hidden Skill You’re Missing
If working hard is hardly working, build more structure into your approach.
Posted June 6, 2025 Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Key points
- Some organizations are better than others at providing employees with clear plans and priorities.
- If your boss isn't giving you the structure you need, it's imperative you create your own.
- Don't shy away from old-fashioned methods like time logs and to-do lists.
You knock yourself out every day, giving 110% to your job. You have good relationships at work. Yet, despite your best efforts, it feels like your work is just not good enough. You just are not getting enough work done well enough, given the time you spend on it.
Take this example of a talented professional who is about to become a partner at a consulting firm. He has impeccable credentials and had acquired significant experience in one of the bigger consulting firms in his field before landing a job at his current firm. But it almost didn’t turn out that way.
“When I first started working at my current company, I was like a fish out of water,” he shared. “There was much less structure to the work than I was used to. The client engagements were smaller, and it was common to get pulled off one client matter and thrown onto something else entirely. Depending on who oversaw a particular client engagement, there would or wouldn’t be an overall work plan. So, it was a lot harder to keep my priorities straight and stay organized and focused.”
In that less structured setting, he continued, “I was having a really hard time being as productive as I was used to being. I kept finding I was going in the wrong direction on one thing or another, sometimes for days at a time before I realized it. I was getting to work earlier and staying later, but I was wasting time, working a lot more hours than I ever had, but impressing nobody.”
The situation kept getting worse until he had a long heart-to-heart with one of the partners: “He basically told me, ‘Look, I’ve been there. I know exactly what you are going through. You are used to having a lot more structure. Here, nobody gives you that structure. You must create that structure around your own work for yourself.’”
The lesson?
“I realized I was going to have to get organized and start making better use of my time. I was going to have to develop good habits to keep track of my own work and maintain my focus. I had to set and keep track of my own priorities, schedule, to-do list, checklists for quality control. That helped a lot. It was pretty much the turnaround moment that made it possible for me to do as well as I’ve done here.”
If you find yourself in a similar scenario—working hard yet not being as effective as you should—it would be wise to reconsider your work habits, specifically those habits related to organization and focus. Regardless of where you work or what you do, if you are going to get lots of work done very well, very fast, day after day, you need structure.
Use your time wisely.
One of the best gifts you can give yourself is maintaining an old-fashioned time log to understand how you are using your time and to identify and eliminate time-wasters. Each time you change from one activity to another, note it in your log.
Set priorities and regularly revisit them.
If you have limited time and too much to do, then you need to set priorities—an order of precedence or preference for your tasks—so that you control what gets done first, second, third, and so on. Make sure you are devoting the lion’s share of your time to first and second priorities.
Plan your work every step of the way and be prepared to adjust.
Before you can make a realistic work plan, you must know how long each task is going to take. Break big projects into manageable tasks, estimate accurately how long they will each take to complete, and set a timetable based on those realistic estimates. Compare the timetable you established at the beginning of the project to the time it actually took to complete, and use that information to adjust future plans accordingly.
Take notes, maintain a to-do list, and create checklists.
Notetaking is a process. If you take notes every step of the way at work, you can use them to maintain your to-do list, to track progress, and to revise and adjust your work plan as needed. Also, use your notetaking to create checklists to help you ensure the quality and completeness of your work. Checklists are common in workplaces where there is little room for error: Operating rooms, airplane cockpits, nuclear weapons launch sites, accounting firms, and so on. There’s a reason for that!
Take action and keep moving forward.
Nothing gets done unless somebody does it. In this case, that somebody is you. If you have one hundred phone calls to make, start with the first one and move on to the second and then the third, and so on. Each call is a concrete action. Every concrete action can be broken down into smaller components, and each small component is itself another concrete action. If you get bogged down with the feeling that you are “not getting anything done,” break every task into its smaller components and start tackling them one at a time.
